I saw a girl lying on the road with blood coming out of the top of her head. Her head was full of metal.” Najla saw women and children “coming out of the back of the ambulance, cowering and screaming and hiding. One man threw himself into the orchard then came out holding two children by the arms. One was a little girl who was wounded and barefoot but she was still trying to put her scarf back on. Then he saw two-month-old Mariam lying three metres from the ambulance “All her body had holes through it.

Wounded in the head and foot, Abbas Jiha stands in the road beside one of his dead daughters, weeping and shrieking “God is Great” up into the sky, towards the helicopter. “I raised my fists to the pilot and cried out, ‘My God, my God, my family has gone.’ “Abbas found his son Mehdi alive. It was all I could think of, despite the screaming and smoke, this terrible heat. It was as if someone was holding a flame in front of my eyes.”Abbas Jiha recalls hurling himself from the door of the ambulance just before it crashed into the house “I was terrified I couldn’t believe it It was the end of my world. I knew what must have happened to my family.” Najla, trembling with fear, was now videotaping the terrible aftermath of the Israeli missile attack. Somehow I was outside the ambulance and I found a big barrel of water and started to wash my face from the heat. Milliseconds after the ambulance cleared UN Checkpoint 1-23, the missile exploded through the back door, engulfing the vehicle in fire and smoke and hurling it 20 metres through the air into the living-room of a house.All Fadila remembers was “a great heat in my face, like a blazing fire.

And I saw a missile flying from the Apache with a trail of smoke behind it.” In fact, the Israeli helicopter pilot fired two missiles; one was later discovered unexploded beside a neighbouring mosque, its steel cylinder, fins and nameplate still intact Najla’s videotape records what happened to the other rocket. “It was getting lower and nearer, and I’ve learnt that this means the pilot is going to fire. I felt he was going to fire a missile but I didn’t imagine the target would be so close to me I heard a sound like ‘puff-puff’, a very small sound. “One of them was crying out to me: ‘The helicopter is coming close to us – it’s chasing us.’ I looked out of the window and I could see the Apache getting closer. I told them all: `Don’t be afraid – just say, Allahu Akbar [God is Great] and the name of the Imam Ali [son- in-law of the prophet and founder of the Shia faith].’ I had told them not to be afraid but I was very frightened.”Najla Abujahjah saw the same helicopter. I saw an ambulance coming down the road and thought it must have wounded on board but then saw it was full of women and children.

There was another car moving in the opposite direction and the ambulance driver was waving with his hand, telling it to turn back.” The videotape record of those moments shows the ambulance passing the UN checkpoint, as Abbas Jiha’s hand comes from the window, urging the car to stop.It was then that Abbas Jiha heard the women in the back of his ambulance shouting at him. “There were two helicopters in the sky, watching the checkpoint,” she says. “I was worried about those helicopters, about what they were doing there. “Can you imagine what it was like with 14 people in the vehicle?” Fadila asks. Abbas Jiha remembers that part of the village was now on fire, the smoke curling over the fields. “We left in a convoy of tractors and cars and headed for Amriyeh where there was a UN post with Fijian soldiers on the main coast road to Tyre.

The shells were falling all round us in the fields.”Najla Abujahjah was herself now standing in front of the Fijian position – UN Checkpoint 1-23 – taking still pictures of refugee traffic on the road, her friend holding her videocamera. Abbas and Mohamed Hishem, the only male adults, sat in the front of the ambulance along with six-year-old Mehdi; the rest sat pressed together in the back. I asked if he would take me and he said, `No problem.’ “By the time Abbas Jiha left Mansouri, he had 13 terrified passengers crammed into the vehicle. There was his wife Mona and their four children, Fadila and her aunt Nowkal, Mohamed Hisham, a window repairman, and five members of the al-Khaled family – 22-year-old Nadia, who was Nowkal’s daughter, and her four nieces, Sahar (three), Aida (seven), Hudu (11) and Manar (13). “My brothers had left in a pick-up and other people had escaped in farm tractors.